And This is Why I have 7 Mustards and No Toilet Paper

i have all these blog posts in the works about big topics like 'what it is to be female' and more personal reflections on sex relations and my place on the planet, as a woman, and respect and power and....

....my life gets in the way of me finishing a thought.

and then tonight i made this cocktail with, like, whiskey and bitters and orange juice and all my smartin' is off the rails.

so, fucket. for now i'm just dealing with the fact that the work-mom complex is all i did today and that i'll try to find time for creative dissection tomorrow.

i took the children to the market tonight after i picked them up from daycare after work.

(it was a grocery store, but sometimes i like to pretend i'm in old english novel).

so, we went to the market and i giveth the children some fruit roll-ups straight from the not-yet paid for packaging to try to keep them contenteth whilst we shopped.

it worked very temporarily and then anna kept screaming. she screams that scream that sounds like a tea kettle is being axe murdered in an abandoned cabin in the woods and for some reason a car alarm is also going off nearby. and they're both asking for everything they see. like they haven't eaten in a month and simply can't live without...those 2-day old discount cinnamon rolls, or whatever. not that i blame them on that one because they probably are perfect sad food.

fellow shoppers look toward me with flinching, disappointed faces, and then pretend they don't see my distress. i'm never sure if strangers think i'm under or over-reacting. i'm a messy combination of bribes, threats, and twitching.

it's not great.

i had a grocery list when i got there. at least i think i had a list. i've no idea. one of them may have eaten it. all's i know is that when i got home, we had something like 47 different kinds of pretzels, multiple chocolate bars, and every snack-sized applesauce on the market in the bags. i think i must have gone into a fugue state. by the end of it, they could have yelled at me to put the cashier lady in the trunk and i would have loaded her into the honda feet-first.

sigh. this HAS to get better eventually. they won't always be this shrill and demanding (and delightful, and sweet, and tiny and cute, i know, i KNOW), right?

meanstwhile i need an applesauce pretzel cake recipe.

i'd eat that. i'd eat the whole thing in one long sad shoveling motion. my tears moistening it like the hotdog contest eaters with the buns.

ah, shit. i forgot hotdog buns.